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Managing Your Archive in Outlook
2/1/2008 by Todd Herring
Most of us are familiar with the Auto-archive feature in Outlook. While there is no right way or wrong way to
configure Auto-archive, here are some tips for your consideration.
First, store an email archive file on the H: drive (your personal area) to keep the file protected as this area is "backed up"
on a regular basis. This location also ensures that the archive is available from other computers you may use. Second,
create a new archive file once per year, so that no single archive file grows too big and you don't have all your eggs in one basket – if you have one
giant archive file and it becomes corrupt, you could lose all your archived email. Third, while it's tempting to
archive absolutely everything, all those unnecessary e-mails only add to the bulk of your archive file and make it
more difficult and slower to find things. Consider these options:
- Create folders in your Inbox to organize your messages, and only move the
last e-mail in the thread to a folder. Delete all the previous messages in the thread. A thread is a series of
replies back and forth between you and one or more people. If each of those messages contains the previous messages,
there's no need to archive the whole series because the last message contains the whole "conversation."
- Create a folder in your Inbox called "Archived Messages" and only move messages into that folder that
you consider worthy of archiving. Delete everything else as soon as you've read it. This saves you the trouble of
organizing folders as described above.
And finally, make sure the Auto-archive feature is enabled on only one computer. Configuring Auto-archive on more
than one computer isn't necessary, and can lead to problems and confusion. In most situations, it's best to only configure it on your
office computer, where you have a continuous and reliable network connection and where our support staff can assist you.
For specific details about how to accomplish the tasks suggested here,
click here to
find more. Of course, as always, please feel free to contact us to arrange a consultation.
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